


Alluvium - Chapter 6

by AWizardWithoutHerStaff



Series: Alluvium - Uprooted from Sarkan's POV [6]
Category: Uprooted - Naomi Novik
Genre: Canon Rewrite, F/M, Fluff, Light Angst, Magic, POV Sarkan, Rewrite
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-07
Updated: 2020-07-07
Packaged: 2021-03-05 03:28:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25127776
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AWizardWithoutHerStaff/pseuds/AWizardWithoutHerStaff
Summary: I don’t remember reaching her room, or her levering me down onto the bed. I existed only at the threshold of the corruption, a last border drawn between the Wood and myself. Still, I felt her departure, a sudden coldness of absence where she had hovered by my side: I was alone.Chapter 6 of Uprooted from Sarkan's point of view. Our hero is corrupted! And the cure turns out to quite possibly be worse than the disease, seeing as how it completely defies everything Sarkan's ever believed in. And what's Agnieszka doing with that confounding blossom? Warning: containsfeelings.This is a rewrite of Uprooted from Sarkan's point of view – it follows the story of Uprooted very closely and will spoil stuff if you've not read the book. The characters, the story, and dialogue between Agnieszka and Sarkan belong to Naomi Novik – nearly all of the dialogue in this chapter is Novik’s, not mine.This was a weird project which came out of the COVID-19 pandemic, when it got hard to concentrate on my own writing and this seemed like a suitably mad thing to get into.
Relationships: Agnieszka/The Dragon | Sarkan
Series: Alluvium - Uprooted from Sarkan's POV [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1693372
Comments: 42
Kudos: 83





	Alluvium - Chapter 6

**Author's Note:**

> Hellooo lovely people,
> 
> Super sorry that it’s taken me so long to produce Chapter 6. I had a _horrendous_ deadline to work to (a writing deadline, at least, but still!) and I just didn’t have time to do anything else.
> 
> Can I just say a huge thank you to you guys for reading this and especially to those of you commenting. There was actual squealing when I read your comments on my last chapter – you guys made me super happy.
> 
> I hope you enjoy this ridiculous chapter. You can bet that I ran straight from my deadline to hang out with Sarkan. Bless him, he’s having a rough time.
> 
> Hope you’re staying safe! Look after yourselves!  
> xxx

# Alluvium

## Chapter 6

The pain consumed me. I was only barely aware of the tower beneath my feet and the steady presence of Agnieszka by my side. I leaned heavily against her as I staggered down an endless hallway of shadows and stone. Too heavily. I could barely support my own weight, lifting my feet one agonising step after another. I clung to my own arm, forcing the last of my strength through those fingertips. I had to hang on. Just enough. Just long enough for her to do what needed to be done. I don’t remember reaching her room, or her levering me down onto the bed. I existed only at the threshold of the corruption, a last border drawn between the Wood and myself. Still, I felt her departure, a sudden coldness of absence where she had hovered by my side: I was alone.

It was only then that I truly realised I was going to die; everything that I was – that I had been, that I had hoped to be – would be gone. The thought opened up like a black chasm within me and I stared fully into its depths, wanting to back away. I should have been ready, a hundred and fifty years should have been enough, but I wasn’t; it wasn’t. I didn’t want to die.

Fear gave it the opening that it needed, and it slithered shadowy fingers into my mind, because – of course – I wasn’t really alone.

 _‘Sarkan, Sarkan, Sarkan_ ,’ it sang my name as if already owned it. ‘ _Bitter Dragon, cruel Dragon. How long to wait; how futile your fight. Let go, let go, let go.’_

I couldn’t move my mouth, so I said the cleansing words in my mind, holding onto them with the last threads of my magic. _Ulozishtus sovjenta…_

_‘What are you holding on for?’_

_…megiot kozhor…_

_‘She hated you from the beginning, you know. Right from the start. She knew what you were before you did.’_

Old, old memories. Was that all it could find to torment me? If I’d had the strength, I would have smiled. … _ulozishtus megiot_ …

_‘They all hate you; the girl most of all. You took everything she had. She loathes you – fears you. She’s gone. She won’t come back. Why do you hold on? Why die here only to save those who hate you so?’_

I could feel my strength guttering out, like a candle drowning in the last of its wax. Maybe Agnieszka was gone. Maybe this was the end of it. I hoped she had run far enough.

Then I felt someone lift the last of my power, cupping it gently in their hands as if shielding a flame from the wind. There was warmth and light, and the smell of lemon and rosemary, fresh and sharp. A breath of strength rolled through me and I could feel magic, so much of it, a river which roared past my ears. I fancied that I could hear singing; I could neither recognise it nor make out the words, though something about it was achingly familiar. The shadows recoiled away from it, burned by the intensity of its light. The last of my strength was carried along with it: at last, my own small spell of purification ignited, rushing along my arm towards its completion.

I gasped for air as if surfacing from deep underwater. For a moment, I didn’t know where I was or even if I were still alive. I blinked up at the ceiling, at familiar grey stone, and finally released my arm with stiff, aching fingers.

When I looked down, there she was. My rescuer. She was wild, her hair loose and falling down around her neck, her pale face flushed across the top of her cheeks. Her eyes were so bright and hopeful that I could hardly look away from them. In fact, her whole face looked lit from within, as if the enormous and entirely impossible working she had just undertaken had invigorated rather than depleted her; _this_ from the girl who collapsed at my feet at the merest sniff of magic. She had pulled me from the edge of death – worse, from the grip of corruption. It was impossible. _She_ was impossible.

I tried to sit up, struggling against my weakness, and looked down at the chaos of her work spread out around me. There _was_ rosemary and lemon, packed around my arm like something out of an old wives’ tale. I peeled it all away – even the linens were dripping with fragrant water – to reveal the pale skin of my arm underneath: it was clean, unmarred, and utterly free from corruption. I looked back at the peelings and herbs in my fist for some clue of what I was seeing, but my exhausted mind was utterly unable to comprehend it. The book responsible for this nonsense was lying like an old nemesis on my lap. It was open on a page as useless as any other, filled with that cramped, illegible hand. I hardly believed it. I lifted it and turned the book slowly over so I could see the words on the spine: it was Jaga’s incomprehensible, useless little spellbook.

‘You impossible, wretched, nonsensical contradiction,’ I turned to her in bewilderment, ‘what on earth have you done _now_?’

She rocked back, surprised at my outburst, her nose wrinkled in indignation. ‘What ought I have done?’ she snapped at me. ‘And how was I to know to do it? Besides, it worked, didn’t it?’

I wanted to shake her. She had come to the side of a man in the throes of corruption with – what? – lemon peel and garden herbs? And then she’d thrown magic at it and hoped it would save us. That this hadn’t ended in her own corruption was beyond miraculous, and it enraged me to think that she would stumble so blindly into this with her life clutched in her foolish hands. I threw the nonsensical spellbook across the room before I realised what I was doing, and I lurched unsteadily up from the bed. I was weak and exhausted and angry; the only thought able to penetrate my numb mind was a need to get away – to put a door firmly between myself and everything else. I stumbled out of the room and away to the stairs, my hand groping for the railing.

‘You might _thank_ me!’ she yelled at my back.

Some part of me knew that was true, but it was buried beneath a fog of suffocating exhaustion.

I don’t know how I made it to my room. When I finally staggered through the door, I slammed it hard behind me and hauled myself across to my bed. Sinking against the high edge of the mattress, I lifted one trembling hand and pressed it over my mouth. It all came flooding over me: the chimaera, the flight to reach Agnieszka, the certainty of my own death. I felt like I couldn’t quite get my head above water. I must have succumbed to exhaustion then, for I have no memory beyond that moment. When I woke the next morning, I was still fully clothed, my legs hanging inelegantly off the edge of my bed.

I grimaced as I pushed myself up from the mattress, stiff and already irritated. With unsteady hands, I shrugged myself out of my ripped jerkin and soiled clothes. I could still smell the stench of corruption on them, so I threw them into the fireplace; _polzhyt_ sent bright fire licking over them, and I felt a distinct satisfaction as the black stains curled to nothing within the yellow flames. A metal jug and basin were sat on a small table by the window, and I filled it with conjured water, using a cantrip which had thoroughly stymied my talentless pupil: the same pupil, who had inexplicably, maddeningly _cured_ me of corruption.

I leant forward and tipped the jug of water over my head, resolutely trying not to think of the chaos I had woken to – the mess of herbs and soaking linen, that damnable book, her hopeful smile. I could still see it as I combed my fingers through my hair, water trickling down my back, a shock of cold between my shoulders. She had cured the corruption. Cured it. _No one_ had cured the corruption of the Wood, certainly not in one as far gone as I. Maybe Jaga had, in some song or another. Maybe that mad book— no, I _refused_ to believe she had made something out of those scribbled notes where _I_ had failed for so long. Yet how else could she have managed this? There must have been _something._

I stared down at my arm: a thin silver scar ran almost from my wrist to my elbow, but apart from that there was _nothing_. Whatever she had done had cured me completely. It was infuriatingly impossible, but I admit that my heart tripped along with something close to excitement. To cure the corruption of the Wood – this was as great a discovery as I could ever hope to make in all my enduring lifetime. I _had_ to understand it.

 _Vanestalem_ conjured black trousers and a green woollen shirt, the edges of it clasped in gold. I sneered at the forest green wool, wondering if it was this colour because I’d been thinking of her. But I was in too much of a hurry to care. With a bundle of papers under one arm, I jogged briskly up the stairs, near-breathless with anticipation. If I could just learn _enough_ of what she had done, perhaps it was something which could be studied – which could be used to understand the very Wood itself. After all, we had so little knowledge of what lay at the heart of the Wood’s corruption, or even of what made those vast, horrific heart trees.

Of course, she was still sleeping. I hovered in her doorway, my impatience pressing my mouth into a thin, hard line. I must have looked almost as bad as she did when she lurked at the threshold of my library. In the end, my eagerness overtook me and I stepped into her small room, which still smelled – infuriatingly – of rosemary and lemon. It was the cleanest I’d ever seen it, no hint of the corruption, no sign of the battle which had been fought for my life. Had she suddenly mastered cleaning along with her newfound ability to cure corruption?

I sat in the small wooden work-chair by the window, my eyes falling inevitably on the wretched book set on the table beside me. I felt my cheek twitch as I picked it up – an old adversary. It was heavy, packed as it was with my own failings; there were as many pages of my own notes as there were pages in the book, each one more useless than the last. The book itself was crammed with scribbles and vagaries which were supposed to amount to some kind of magic, not that I’d ever found a whit of it myself. I discovered the one she had ‘used’ easily enough, though I could hardly call it a working. _Putting breath on it_. What incomprehensible nonsense.

My teeth were clenched so tight, my jaw began to ache. _How_ had she used this?

She stirred, stretching long like a cat and blinking slowly into a shaft of yellow sunlight. She looked almost happy, until she saw me. As soon as her eyes fell on mine, she sat bolt upright, knuckling the last of the sleep from her eyes, and then glowered at me with all her usual animosity.

I held up the book in answer. ‘What made you pick _this_ up?’

‘It was full of notes!’ she snapped, as if intent on drawing attention to my own failings. ‘I thought it must be important.’

‘It is _not_ important,’ I almost snarled the words, possessed by an ungracious anger. ‘It is _useless_ – it has _been_ useless, for all five hundred years since it was written, and a century of study has not made it anything other than useless.’

She folded her arms like a stubborn child. ‘Well, it wasn’t useless _today_.’

‘How did you know how much rosemary to use? How much lemon?’ I brandished the book at her as if it were evidence of some sort of crime.

‘You used all sorts of amounts, in those tables! I supposed it didn’t much matter!’

‘The tables are of _failures_ , you blundering imbecile.’ It _was_ a crime: a criminal inattention, a fundamental lack of respect. ‘None of them had the least effect – not in any parts, not in any admixture, not with any incantation – what did you _do_?’

‘I used enough to make a nice smell and steeped them to make it stronger. And I used the chant on the page.’ She looked at me expectantly, as if that were some kind of explanation.

‘There is no incantation here! Two trivial syllables, with no power—’

‘When I sang it long enough, it made the magic flow,’ she said, senselessly. ‘I sang it to “Many Years.”’

I stared at her. Here we were at the edge of one of the greatest magical discoveries in five centuries and she was spouting this inane, childish _nonsense_. I almost threw the book at her. Instead, I drew a long, slow breathe and summoned a pen to my hand: this was too important to be lost in the impenetrable thicket of her mind.

‘Tell me,’ I snapped, ‘in every detail. What did you _do?_ ’

I interrogated her, writing every bit of her absurdity down. Or, at least, I tried to. _Somewhere_ in here was a real working. I wrote myself in circles almost as much as she spoke in them; she simply did not know the answers to my questions. She couldn’t tell me how she’d stood, or where her hands had been or _even_ how many rosemary twigs she had used.

She was almost as frustrated as I was when she blurted out, ‘It’s just— a way to go. There isn’t only one way to go. You’re trying to find a road where there isn’t one. It’s like— it’s gleaning in the woods. You have to pick your way through the thickets and the trees, and it’s different every time.’

Talking to _her_ was like picking through the thickets and the trees. I could feel this precious knowledge slipping further and further through my fingers – there was no working here, no spell I could study and understand.

‘That’s nonsense,’ I said, slumping hopelessly back in my chair.

I looked down at my arm, curling my fingers into a fist, my teeth set in frustration.

‘You’d rather have the corruption back than deal with the simple fact you might be wrong!’ She flung herself to her feet in a high temper, her hair still half-stuck to her cheek and her dress hanging off at her shoulder.

I glared at her with a fury that had more to do with the fact she’d read my mind than it did with anything else.

‘I’m going down to the kitchen,’ she announced loftily, the ability to cure corruption apparently beneath her attention.

‘Fine,’ I snapped; I’d had enough of this absurd nonsense anyway.

Back in my library, I was alone with my anger, all the prickly ugliness of it. It was pride, that was the truth of it. I was bitter that she had found meaning in those words where I had not, even though she had undoubtedly saved my life. I was hardly better than the likes of Solya, with all his primped pride and fragile ego. I’d thought I’d left such things behind me; it was a long time since I’d coveted Alosha’s skill in folding magic into metal or looked at the Willow’s ability to heal with envy.

The Willow. Ah. And there was the answer I was looking for.

‘Of course. It’s that you have an ability for healing,’ I said, setting _Groshno’s minor charms_ down on the kitchen table, ‘and it led you to intuit the true spell – even though you can’t remember the particulars accurately anymore. That would explain your general incompetence: healing is a particularly distinct branch of the magical arts. I expect you will progress considerably better going forward, once we devote our attention to the healing disciplines. We’ll begin with Groshno’s minor charms.’ I laid a hand on the book, pleased that I had solved the problem of her magic.

She didn’t even look up from where she was chopping carrots. ‘Not until I’ve eaten lunch, we won’t.’

I scowled. ‘Why must I always deal with stubborn, recalcitrant idiots,’ I muttered through gritted teeth, though I sat down at the table peaceably enough.

In truth, the smell of her cooking had awoken my hunger, which twisted hollow and uncomfortable in the pit of my stomach. It had been days since I had last eaten anything. When she set the bowl of soup in front me, thin steam coiling off its surface, it took a great deal of restraint not to immediately devour both the contents of the bowl and the thick slice of bread beside it. I made myself eat slowly, holding the taste of cream and salted chicken in my mouth; it was one of the finest things I have ever tasted.

I was more restored by the food than I’d care to admit, and there was something achingly normal about the two of us sitting down together in this small kitchen. She blew impatiently on a spoonful of soup and one curling strand of her hair got stuck to the edge of it. I endeavoured to say nothing.

‘What happened with the chimaera?’ she asked at length.

‘Vladimir’s not a fool, thankfully.’ I grimaced; no, only I had earned that moniker. ‘After he sent his messenger, he baited the thing close to the border by staking out calves and having his pikemen harry it from every other direction. He lost ten of them, but he managed to get it not an hour’s ride from the mountain pass. I was able to kill it quickly. It was only a small one: scarcely the size of a pony.’

‘Surely that’s good?’

I scowled at her, even though I’d almost let myself believe the same thing. ‘It was a _trap_. I was meant to be kept away until the corruption had overrun all of Dvernik, and worn down before I came.’ That much of the trap _had_ worked. I gazed down at my arm, opening and closing my fist. I would bear the scar of that folly for the rest of my life.

‘Then, I did well to go?’ her voice was so hesitant and hopeful that I did not point out that it may well have been a trap for _her_ , that both of us had nearly died, and that losing all of Dvernik would have been preferable to a corrupted witch and wizard turning their power on Polnya.

Instead I looked away and said, ‘If anyone could say so when you’ve poured out fifty years’ worth of my most valuable potions in less than a day. Did it never occur to you that if they could be so easily spent, I would give half a dozen flasks to every village headman, and save myself the trouble of ever setting foot in the valley?’

‘They can’t be worth more than people’s lives,’ she said, now an expert in morality as well as unfathomable magic.

‘A life before you in the moment isn’t worth a hundred elsewhere, three months from now,’ I explained as patiently as I could manage. ‘Listen, you simpleton, I have one bottle of fire-heart in the refining now: I began it six years ago, when the king could afford to give me the gold for it, and it will be finished in another four. If we spend all my supply before then, do you suppose Rosya will generously refrain from firing our fields, knowing that we’ll have starved and sued for peace before we can return the favour? And there are likewise costs for every other vial you spent. All the more because Rosya has three master-wizards who can brew potions, to our two.’

‘But we’re not at war!’

‘We will be in the spring, if they hear a song of fire-heart and stone-skin and profligacy, and think they might have gained a real advantage.’ I looked at her hard, hoping the weight of this would find her. ‘Or if they hear a song of a healer strong enough to purge corruption, and think that soon the balance will tip in our favour, instead, when you are trained.’

 _That_ seemed to sink through her impenetrable skull.

She stared down at the table, the edge of her lip curled in over her teeth. ‘Do you think I could help Jerzy, once I’ve been trained?’

‘Help a man already fully corrupted?’ I started to scoff, but then I stopped, because the truth was I didn’t know – I didn’t know anything of what she was capable of. ‘You shouldn’t have been able to help me.’

She drank down the rest of her soup grimly, as if I was here to escort her to her execution, and wiped her mouth of the sleeve of her dress – some things clearly would not change. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Let’s get on with it.’

I was wrong again, which should no longer have surprised me when it came to Agnieszka’s magic, but I had so firmly believed that I had solved the mystery of her incompetence that I was horrified by her inability all over again. Where before she had been mildly inept, now she was furiously useless. On the fourth day, she stormed into my library clutching that damnable book and flung it down in front of me. ‘Why won’t you teach me from _this?_ ’

I glared at it. ‘Because it’s unteachable. I’ve barely managed to codify the simplest cantrips into any usable form, and none of the higher workings. Whatever her notoriety, in practice it’s worth almost nothing.’

‘What do you mean notoriety?’ She looked up sharply. ‘Who wrote this?’

‘Jaga,’ I said and, sure enough, there was all the superstitious, slack-jawed fear I had expected, as if the time-travelling witch would appear out of a song to turn us both into frogs at the mere mention of her name. ‘Stop looking like a solemn six-year-old. Contrary to popular imagination, she is _dead_ , and whatever time-wandering she may have done beforehand, I assure you she would have had a larger purpose than to run around eavesdropping on gossip about herself. As for that book, I spent an inordinate amount of money and trouble to get it, and congratulated myself on the acquisition until I realised how infuriatingly incomplete it was. She plainly only used it to jog her memory: it has no details of real spellwork.’

‘The four I’ve tried have all worked perfectly well,’ she said.

My mouth almost fell open. I must have looked as horrified as she had at the mention of Jaga’s name.

‘Impossible,’ I snapped. That she’d somehow – by staggering, improbable happenstance – discovered a true working within Jaga’s notes seemed barely possible, if irrefutable; that she’d done it another three times was beyond all possibility.

Of course, she proved me wrong. Again. The spells flowed and tripped lightly off her tongue in phrases which, to me, sounded hollow and powerless; she found magic in unremarkable objects and casual, untidy gestures. Precision was a word which had yet to encounter Agnieszka and she certainly had no notion of its meaning. And yet I could feel the power gather and spill forth from her fingertips – that glittering river of magic which I had felt so keenly the previous night – those meagre ‘workings’ granting her power where they had lain dead in my mouth. I wish I could say that I was gracious about it.

In the end, I tried to replicate her madness. I noted everything: the angle of her feet, the crook of her wrist – even her clumsiness, as she breathed in the cinnamon and sneezed half of it onto the floor. It was like trying to understand the ravings of a lunatic. All the while, she watched me with her arms folded and a judgemental twist to her mouth. She shifted impatiently, straining to interrupt me, as if desperate to answer a question I hadn’t finished asking. I glared at her out of the corner of my eye, but even then, I knew it wasn’t working. When I finally came to stand over the assortment of useless clutter _she_ had somehow combined into a working, I knew I might as well have thrown my dinner into a cauldron and called it a potion. I felt ridiculous.

‘You shouldn’t have said _miko_ there,’ she said, her tone imperious.

I rounded on her. ‘ _You_ did.’

She shrugged with all the care I had come to expect from her. ‘It was all right when I did it, but when you did it, it was wrong. As though – you were following a trail, but a tree had fallen down in the meantime, or some hedge grew up, and you insisted on continuing on anyway, instead of going around it—’

That was more than I could bear. ‘There are no _hedges_!’

She folded her arms and stuck out her chin, like some wise old sage. ‘It comes, I suppose, of spending too much time alone indoors, and forgetting that living things don’t always stay where you put them.’

I was trembling with anger as I pointed at the door. ‘ _Get out._ ’

It is a difficult thing to have someone completely dismantle your hard-earned beliefs, harder still to watch them do so in such a chaotic and careless manner. I watched her perform magic with no consistency, no care for the syllabic composition or the proper orders of magic, and apparently no memory of what she had just done. Where I had learned magic locked into carefully built frameworks – precisely cut pieces which assembled into rigid and familiar forms – she seemed to ride a cresting wave which would crash down how and where it chose. Time and again I was reminded of the Spindle and the tangle of magic I felt within its depths. Her magic was as unpredictable as water – and so that was the first thing I tried to teach her.

Where I could not lead her through her inexplicable methods, I could at least judge her on her results; magic worked by a witch or a wizard cannot be allowed to be erratic or unpredictable – there is too much danger there. For every spell, I made her seek its meaning, sense its depths and what it would take from her. I stood over her, ready to dam the flood or prop up her power as was needed – more often the former than the latter.

There was a greatness there, I had to admit it. All that power I had sensed in her was suddenly at her command – she blazed furiously through the simplest of Jaga’s spells and was soon grasping at the more complicated workings. After all those months of failures, her ability grew now at a rate which was almost alarming. I had plenty of material for her to work from: I was easily able to identify what would be of use to her from how _useless_ it had been to me. More often than not, the spellbooks resembled Jaga’s grubby journal, as if they were connected to her by more than simply compatible magic: small icons of her slovenly and careless habits.

And yet, as the weeks rolled by, I found myself watching her work with a sort of grudging admiration. Even as she struggled, I could feel the fierce heartbeat of her power; every time I challenged her, she only lifted herself higher.

Of course, that didn’t stop her whining about it.

‘I don’t understand.’ She stood at the centre of my library with a single blossom cupped in her hands – an illusion of a wild rose. Its petals tapered gently from white to pink, its stamens stained yellow with pollen, but it cast no shadow and smelt of the sharp scent of magic rather than damp petals. ‘It’s far easier just to _grow_ a flower: why would anyone bother?’

I peered down my nose at her latest effort – an improvement on the previous attempts by far but still woefully inadequate. ‘It’s a matter of scale. I assure you it is considerably easier to produce the illusion of an army than the real thing.’ When I looked up at her, I found her staring mournfully back at me, her face soft-lit by the magic in her hands; there was no sign of strain or even exertion in her expression. ‘How is that even _working_? You aren’t maintaining the spell at all – no chanting, no gesture—’

‘I’m still giving it magic,’ she complained, as if it were as simple as spooning magic onto it like some kind of dessert. ‘A _great deal_ of magic.’

I felt inclined to tell her that she didn’t know what _a great deal_ of magic felt like, but I refrained. ‘ _How_ are you giving it magic?’

‘I already found the path!’ she started her usual vagaries. ‘I’m just staying on it. Can’t you – feel it?’

She proffered the rose towards me and I frowned down at it. I _could_ feel it, her power, like cool breath across my skin. Cupping my hands around hers, I murmured the words, ‘ _Vadiya rusha ilikad tuhi_.’ My illusion settled over hers, its neat petals at odds to the small scrappy thing she held in her hands. Much as her babbling about hedges and paths infuriated me, it was true that language often fell painfully short of the things we tried to create. Instead, I tried to show her. ‘Try and match it,’ I said, my fingers weaving the magic in the place of words.

She brought it closer and closer, inch by unsteady inch, until the edges aligned and then— ‘Ah,’ my breath hitched in my throat as I felt our magic touch. It rushed alongside me: I was in it and part of it, a heady brightness. I saw her eyes widen as she sensed my own power, her lips parted in silent surprise. And then she did something I had never felt before – she _took_ it: she took our power and wove it together. I felt her seize me like vines wrapping up and through the brickwork of a tower, only it made us both immeasurably stronger.

I gasped. ‘What are you—’

Suddenly, there was only a single rose in our hands, vivid, perfect – and glowing. And it grew. Not just the rose, but flowers and vines swept through my library, looping through the bookcases, pushing out tiny green leaves lit bright with sunlight. _Trees_ grew up beside the doorway, the sounds, scents and breath of nature all around us. Through it all, our magic stretched like a web, entwined together – I could feel it, feel _her_ , and in it her joy, confusion and excitement. I was pulled towards it, like she really was leading me down her confounded path in the woods; I had never seen or felt anything like it.

She looked up at me, her face all alight, her eyes bright pools reflecting our magic. ‘Is this what you meant?’

I could only stare back at her, more lost than I have ever felt. She looked wild but brilliant, her expression exultant, her lips twitching into that hopeful smile. The tips of my fingers were just above her skin but her magic bridged the gap, pulsing between us. My traitorous heart quickened with it, thumping so loudly that I wondered if she could hear it. I swallowed.

 _Oh no_.

I don’t know what she saw in my expression – fear, probably – but suddenly the air around us felt closer and her pale cheeks flushed the same colour as the rose. She frowned as she jerked her hands out of mine, and at once our working collapsed, the illusion dissolving into nothingness – and with it, our connection.


End file.
